Ever since I was a kid I've loved English grammar. I've taught it for many years, and I've written a lot of books about it. So people started calling me "Professor Grammar."

So we went back to the drawing board (that's an idiom!) with another artist, Dave Arkle of California. I never met him either, but this time we sent him a lot more pictures of me in many different poses. Dave's a really great caricaturist, and he drew these cartoons which everyone says look more like me than I do. Someone even said they look better than I do!

But a teacher at my school said the cartoon made me look like a Hobbit. A student asked if I was supposed to be one of Snow White's seven dwarfs, and my granddaughter thought I was a Munchkin from The Wizard of Oz. Oh, no!

The cartoon was used in two books.

My publisher, Scholastic, thought it might be fun to have a cartoon of me as Professor Grammar. So I posed for some pictures, and an artist used them to draw cartoon figures of me. He never met me in person, so he didn't really know what I look like.